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New Releases September 6-September 12 and Readers Choice Contest

Happy Monday! Where the heck did the weekend go? Oh, I had to work seven hours without a break at a football event on Saturday. That’ll kill a weekend fast, won’t it? As Jean Lafitte would say, BAH.

Okay, I’m not sure how I let myself get talked into this, but I’m gonna be on a video interview show tonight, Buddy Gott’s Writing Show, with authors Jana Oliver (Demon Trapper’s Daughter series) and Anna Steffl (The Solace Trilogy). I will look like a large, old, demented alien because I can’t get my glasses not to glare, so don’t say I didn’t warn you! You can watch it live HERE at 10 p.m. EDT, 9 p.m. Central. I don’t think you have to register on Google Plus to watch, but am not sure. It’ll be on YouTube afterward, but whether or not I post that link will depend on how stupidly I behave and look. LOL. But I’m sure you’ll enjoy Anna and Jana (and Susannah)…we sound like we should be a 50s singing group.

Also, I’m at EJ Stevens’ From the Shadows blog today, tossing out my five spookiest New Orleans places. Hope you can pop over and say hello!

September is just a huge month for new releases. This week will be one of the smaller weeks for new releases this month. Still, there are twenty-five books from which to choose!

What do you want to read this week? As always, leave a comment telling me the book you’d most like to win, and maybe random.org will make your wishes come true. Your choice of print or digital unless otherwise stated. International? Of course! As long as Book Depository delivers to your country, please enter. If you’d prefer the first book in a series listed here, that’s okay, too.

All Those Broken Angels, by Peter Adam Salomon, (September 8, Flux)
Comforted by a shadow. Haunted by the truth. Richard Anderson was the last person to see his friend Melanie alive. She vanished when they were six and while the police never found Melanie, a part of her remained, a living shadow that is now Richard’s closest friend. For ten years, Richard has never questioned the shadow that keeps him company, until a new girl moves to town, claiming to be Melanie. Desperate to prove the girl is a fake, the shadow leads Richard to the place where her killer buried her bones. But Richard finds skeletons from several different children, and evidence suggesting that perhaps the shadow isn’t who she says she is.

Rogue’s Paradise (Covenant of Thorns #3), by Jeffe Kennedy, (September 8, Carina Press)
Pregnant, possessed, and in love with a man I don’t dare to trust, those are the consequences of the risks I took to save my life. Faerie, the land of blood and magic, is filled with bitter ironies, and the bargains I made now threaten me and my unborn child. The darkly sensual fae noble Rogue still tempts me to danger and desire. I’ve been forced to question whether our offspring is part of a bargain Rogue once made to save himself. He can’t tell me the truth due to a spell the vicious Queen Titania has him under. Rogue insists on an eternal commitment from me, even as Titania’s forces close in on us. I don’t know if Rogue and I can withstand her onslaught, or that of the beast within me. But I will not stop looking for answers, even if it brings the walls of Faerie crashing down. (ebook only)

The Lonely, by Ainslie Hogarth, (September 8, Flux)
After she discovers The Terrible Thing, Easter Deetz goes looking for her sister, Julia, but ends up pinned under a giant boulder with her legs crushed into tomato paste. Bored, disappointed, and thoroughly dismembered, Easter slowly bleeds to death in The Woods with only sinister squirrels to keep her company. As The Something Coming draws closer, memories of Easter’s family surface like hallucinations: a mumbling father who lives alone in the basement; a terrifying grandmother who sits in her enclosed porch all day; an overly loving mother who plays dead in the bathtub on Sunday nights. Easter realizes she’s being stalked, making it very difficult for her to bleed to death in peace. Will The Something Coming save her? Or will it do her in entirely?

City of Stairs, by Robert Jackson Bennett, (September 9, Broadway Books)
Years ago, the city of Bulikov wielded the powers of the Gods to conquer the world. But after its divine protectors were mysteriously killed, the conqueror has become the conquered; the city’s proud history has been erased and censored, progress has left it behind, and it is just another colonial outpost of the world’s new geopolitical power. Into this musty, backward city steps Shara Divani. The quiet woman is just another lowly diplomat sent by Bulikov’s oppressors. Shara is one of her country’s most accomplished spymasters, dispatched to investigate the brutal murder of a seemingly harmless historian. Shara begins to suspect that the beings who once protected Bulikov may not be as dead as they seem, and that her own abilities might be touched by the divine as well.

Egg & Spoon, by Gregory Maguire, (September 9, Candlewick Press)
Elena Rudina lives in the impoverished Russian countryside. Her father has been dead for years. One of her brothers has been conscripted into the Tsar’s army, the other taken as a servant in the house of the local landowner. Her mother is dying, slowly, in their tiny cabin. And there is no food. But then a train arrives in the village, a train carrying untold wealth, a cornucopia of food, and a noble family destined to visit the Tsar in Saint Petersburg, a family that includes Ekaterina, a girl of Elena’s age. When the two girls’ lives collide, an adventure is set in motion, an escapade that includes mistaken identity, a monk locked in a tower, a prince traveling incognito, and Baba Yaga, witch of Russian folklore, in her ambulatory house perched on chicken legs.

Evil Librarian, by Michelle Knudsen, (September 9, Candlewick Press)
When Cynthia Rothschild’s best friend, Annie, falls head over heels for the new high-school librarian, Cyn can totally see why. He’s really young and super cute and thinks Annie would make an excellent library monitor. After meeting Mr. Gabriel, Cyn realizes something isn’t quite right. Cyn realizes that Mr. Gabriel is, in fact, a demon. In addition to saving the school musical from technical disaster and trying not to make a fool of herself with her own hopeless crush, Cyn has to save her best friend from the clutches of the evil librarian, who also seems to be slowly sucking the life force out of the entire student body.

Exo (Jumper #4), by Steven Gould, (September 9, Tor)
Cent can teleport. So can her parents, but they are the only people in the world who can. This is not as great as you might think it would be, sure, you can go shopping in Japan and then have tea in London, but it’s hard to keep a secret like that. And there are people, dangerous people, who work for governments and have guns, who want to make you do just this one thing for them. And when you’re a teenage girl things get even more complicated. High school. Boys. Global climate change, refugees, and genocide. Orbital mechanics. But Cent isn’t easily daunted, and neither are Davy and Millie, her parents. She’s going to make some changes in the world.

Festive in Death (In Death #39), by J.D. Robb, (September 9, Putnam Adult)
Personal trainer Trey Ziegler was in peak physical condition. If you didn’t count the kitchen knife in his well-toned chest. Lieutenant Eve Dallas soon discovers a lineup of women who’d been loved and left by the narcissistic gym rat. While Dallas sorts through the list of Ziegler’s enemies, she’s also dealing with her Christmas shopping list, plus the guest list for her and her billionaire husband’s upcoming holiday bash. Feeling less than festive, Dallas tries to put aside her distaste for the victim and solve the mystery of his death. There are just a few investigating days left before Christmas, and as New Year’s 2061 approaches, this homicide cop is resolved to stop a cold-blooded killer.

Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Neal Stephenson, Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer, (September 9, William Morrow)
An anthology of stories, set in the near future, from some of today’s leading writers, thinkers, and visionaries that reignites the iconic and optimistic visions of the golden age of science fiction. In his 2011 article “Innovation Starvation,” Neal Stephenson advanced the Hieroglyph Theory which illuminates the power of science fiction to inspire the inventive imagination. Now comes this remarkable anthology uniting twenty of today’s leading thinkers, writers, and visionaries, among them Cory Doctorow, Gregory Benford, Elizabeth Bear, Bruce Sterling, and Neal Stephenson, to contribute works of “techno-optimism” that challenge us to dream and do Big Stuff. Engaging, mind-bending, provocative, and imaginative, Hieroglyph offers a forward-thinking approach to the intersection of art and technology that has the power to change our world.

Illusions of Fate, by Kiersten White, (September 9, Harper Teen)
Jessamin has been an outcast since she moved from her island home of Melei to the dreary country of Albion. Everything changes when she meets Finn, a gorgeous, enigmatic young lord who introduces her to the secret world of Albion’s nobility, a world that has everything Jessamin doesn’t, power, money, status, and magic. But Finn has secrets of his own, dangerous secrets that the vicious Lord Downpike will do anything to possess. Unless Jessamin, armed only with her wits and her determination, can stop him.

Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant, (September 9, Candlewick Press)
Predatory kraken that sing with, and for, their kin; band members and betrayed friends who happen to be demonic; harpies as likely to attract as to repel. Welcome to a world where humans live side-by-side with monsters, from vampires both nostalgic and bumbling, to an eight-legged alien who makes tea. Here you’ll find mercurial forms that burrow into warm fat, spectral boy toys, a Maori force of nature, a landform that claims lives, and an architect of hell on earth. Through these, and a few monsters that defy categorization, some of today’s top young-adult authors explore ambition and sacrifice, loneliness and rage, love requited and avenged, and the boundless potential for connection, even across extreme borders. Contributing authors include: M. T. Anderson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Nathan Ballingrud, Holly Black, Sarah Rees Brennan, Cassandra Clare, Nalo Hopkinson, Dylan Horrocks, Nik Houser, Alice Sola Kim, Kathleen Jennings, Joshua Lewis, Kelly Link, Patrick Ness and G. Carl Purcell.

Of Monsters and Madness, by Jessica Verday, (September 9, EgmontUSA)
Annabel Lee is summoned from Siam to live with her father in 1820’s Philadelphia shortly after her mother’s death. Annabel becomes infatuated with her father’s assistant Allan, who dabbles in writing when he’s not helping with medical advancements. But in darker hours, when she’s not to be roaming the house, she encounters the devilish assistant Edgar, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Allan, and who others insist doesn’t exist. A rash of murders across Philadelphia, coupled with her father’s strange behavior, leads Annabel to satisfy her curiosity and uncover a terrible truth: Edgar and Allan are two halves of the same person, and they are about to make the crimes detailed in Allan’s stories come to life. Unless Annabel stops them.

Red Blooded (Jessica McClain #4), by Amanda Carlson, (September 9, Orbit)
Jessica is going to Hell. After settling a fragile truce between the vampires, werewolves and witches, the last thing Jessica wants to do is face the demons head on. But when the Prince of Hell kidnapped her brother, he set into motion a chain of events that even Jessica doesn’t have the power to stop. Now, Jessica must go into battle again. But Hell is a whole new beast, new rules, more dangerous demons, and an entirely foreign realm. And when Jessica is dropped into the Underworld too soon, without protection or the help of her friends, she must figure out just how powerful she can be, or she will never make it out alive.

Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, (September 9, Knopf)
One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. The world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time-from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains, charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.

Sword of the Bright Lady (World of Prime #1), by M.C. Planck, (September 9, Pyr)
Christopher Sinclair goes out for a walk on a mild Arizona evening and never comes back. He stumbles into a freezing winter under an impossible night sky, where magic is real, but bought at a terrible price. A misplaced act of decency lands him in a brawl with a nobleman and puts him under a death sentence. He agrees to be drafted into an eternal war, serving as a priest of the Bright Lady, Goddess of Healing. When Marcius, god of war, offers the only hope of a way home to his wife, Christopher pledges to him instead. To win enough power to open a path home, he must survive duelists, assassins, and the threat of monsters, with only his makeshift technology to compete with swords and magic. The gods and demons have other plans. Christopher’s fate will save the world, or destroy it.

The Caller (Shadowfell #3), by Juliet Marillier, (September 9, Knopf)
Neryn has made a long journey to perfect her skills as a Caller. She has learned the wisdom of water and of earth; she has journeyed to the remote isles of the west and the forbidding mountains of the north. Neryn must travel in Alban’s freezing winter to seek the White Lady, Guardian of Air. When Neryn has been trained by all four Guardians will she be ready to play her role in toppling King Keldec. The White Lady is not what she seems. Trapped with Whisper, her fey protector, Neryn is unable to send word to her beloved Flint, who is in danger of being exposed as a double agent. Neryn must enter Keldec’s court, where one false move could see her culled. She must stand up against forces more powerful than any she has confronted, and losses that could break her heart. (U.S. Release)

The Falcon Throne (The Tarnished Crown Quintet #1), by Karen Miller, (September 9, Orbit)
In the distant past, the Kingdom of Harcia was torn apart by royal brothers who could not accept a lesser inheritance. Now, the consequences of their actions are coming to light. Balfre, son of Aimery, Duke of Harcia, is his father’s heir. But he has dreams of a crown, not a coronet. He dreams himself the king of a Harcia re-united, but his brother Grefin, their father’s favorite, stands in his way. Harald, debauched Duke of neighboring Clemen, is feared and despised by his nobles. He thinks he can trust his bastard-born cousin Ederic, but Ederic fears for the duchy and will do what he must to save it. And caught between dangers is Harald’s infant son, Liam. Stolen by his nurse, vanished into the lawless Marches, he is the spark that will grow to set the world on fire.

The Iron Trial (Magisterium #1), by Holly Black and Cassandra Clare, (September 9, Scholastic Press)
Most kids would do anything to pass the Iron Trial. Not Callum Hunt. He wants to fail. All his life, Call has been warned by his father to stay away from magic. If he succeeds at the Iron Trial and is admitted into the Magisterium, he is sure it can only mean bad things for him. So he tries his best to do his worst, and fails at failing. Now the Magisterium awaits him. It’s a place that’s both sensational and sinister, with dark ties to his past and a twisty path to his future. The Iron Trial is just the beginning, for the biggest test is still to come.

The Twyning, by Terence Blacker, (September 9, Candlewick Press)
Efren is a young rat, unnoticed and timid among the kingdom of rats living in the London sewers. When the king dies, leaving the kingdom in upheaval, only Efren dares to journey into the human world, where he discovers a human doctor’s plan to destroy London’s entire rat population. Meanwhile, Peter, otherwise known as Dogboy, does odd jobs for both the scheming doctor and the town ratcatcher. But his gift for understanding animals, even rats, forces him to decide where his allegiances truly lie. Dogboy and Efren, along with the waifish girl Caz and her pet rat, Malaika, set out to test the strengths of friendship and loyalty against the gut-wrenching cruelties of the world. (U.S. Release)

The Witch with No Name (The Hollows #13), by Kim Harrison, (September 9, Harper Voyager)
Rachel Morgan’s come a long way from her early days as an inexperienced bounty hunter. She’s faced vampires and werewolves, banshees, witches, and soul-eating demons. She’s crossed worlds, channeled gods, and accepted her place as a day-walking demon. She’s lost friends and lovers and family, and an old enemy has become something much more. But power demands responsibility, and world-changers must always pay a price. That time is now. To save Ivy’s soul and the rest of the living vampires, to keep the demonic ever after and our own world from destruction, Rachel Morgan will risk everything.

The Zom-B Chronicles (Zom-B #1-3), by Darren Shan, (September 9, Little, Brown Books)
B Smith doesn’t fully buy into Dad’s racism, but figures it’s easier to go along with it than risk the fights and abuse that will surely follow sticking up for Muslims, black, or immigrants. That is, until zombies attack. This bind-up of the first three novellas in the Zom-B series leads B on a mad dash through the corridors of high school, a secret underground military complex, and the dangerous streets of a very changed London, making allegiances with anyone who has enough gall to fight off the deadly, and undead, attackers.

Tuckitor’s Last Swim: A Tor.Com Original, by Edith Cohn, (September 9, Tor)
Tuckitor Hatterask had a fierce desire to go for a swim, even though a storm was brewing and he knew it wasn’t a good idea to go into the water. But the forces pulling him toward the ocean were much stronger than he ever could had imagined. In this companion short story to Spirit’s Key, readers learn how a family on a small southern island came to be haunted by hurricanes. (ebook only)

Vampires of Manhattan (Vampires of Manhattan #1), by Melissa de la Cruz, (September 9, Hyperion)
Oliver Hazard-Perry, former human conduit, and Manhattan’s only human-turned-vampire, is now the head of the Blue Bloods Coven. When his all-too-human lover is found murdered on the eve of the coven’s annual Four Hundred Ball, a celebration meant to usher in a new era in vampire society, and to mark the re-unification of the Coven after decades of unrest and decay, Oliver is devastated. Not only is he trying to create a new world order for the immortal elite, he’s the prime suspect and is stalked by the newly installed head of the vampire secret police. Because according to the new rules, vampires who take human life can now be executed. Burned. How can an immortal sentenced to die fight back? He has to find the killer, and the answers lie deep in vampire lore.

Yesterday’s Kin, by Nancy Kress, (September 9, Tachyon Publications)
Aliens have landed in New York. A deadly cloud of spores has already infected and killed the inhabitants of two worlds. Now that plague is heading for Earth, and threatens humans and aliens alike. Can either species be trusted to find the cure? Geneticist Marianne Jenner is immersed in the desperate race to save humanity, yet her family is tearing itself apart. Siblings Elizabeth and Ryan are strident isolationists who agree only that an alien conspiracy is in play. Marianne’s youngest, Noah, is a loner addicted to a drug that constantly changes his identity. But between the four Jenners, the course of human history will be forever altered. Earth’s most elite scientists have ten months to prevent human extinction, and not everyone is willing to wait.

The small print: This contest is international to any place Book Depository ships. Contests end at midnight CDT U.S. on Saturday, and winners will be announced on Sunday’s blog. It’s the responsibility of the winner to contact me with their mailing info.